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Florian Sévellec and Bablu Sinha

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article.
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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is a large, basin scale circulation located in the Atlantic Ocean and transporting climatically important quantities of heat northward. It can be described schematically as a northward flow in the warm upper ocean and a southward return flow at depth, in much colder water. Because of the dominance of oceanic heat content in Earth’s energy storage (the heat capacity of a layer of 2 m of seawater is equivalent to that of the entire atmosphere) and its typical slow decadal variations, the AMOC regulates North Atlantic climate and contributes to the relatively mild climate of Europe. Because of the AMOC’s influence on climate, predicting its variations is crucial for predicting climate variations in regions bordering the North Atlantic. Similar to weather predictions, climate predictions are based on numerical simulations of the climate system. However providing accurate predictions on such long timescales is far from straightforward. Even in a perfect model approach, where biases between numerical models and reality are ignored, the chaotic nature of AMOC variability (i.e., high sensitivity to initial conditions) is a significant source of uncertainty, limiting its accuracy of prediction.

Predictability studies focus on factors determining our ability to predict the AMOC rather than on the actual predictions. To this end, processes affecting AMOC predictability can be separated into two categories: processes acting as a source of predictability (periodic harmonic oscillations, for instance) and processes acting as a source of uncertainty (small errors that grow and significantly modify the outcome of numerical simulations). To understand the former category, harmonic modes of variability or precursors of AMOC variations are identified. However, in a perfect model approach, the sources of uncertainty are characterized by the spread of numerical simulations differentiated by the application of small differences to their initial conditions. Two alternative and complementary frameworks have arisen to investigate this spread. The pragmatic framework corresponds to performing an ensemble of simulations, by imposing a randomly chosen small error on the initial conditions of individual simulations. This allows a probabilistic approach and the means to statistically characterize the importance of the initial condition by evaluating the spread of the ensemble. The theoretical framework uses stability analysis to identify small perturbations to the initial conditions that are conducive to significant disruption of the AMOC.

Corinna Schrum

Regional models were originally developed to serve weather forecasting and regional process studies. Typical simulations encompass time periods in the order of days or weeks. Thereafter ...
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Regional models were originally developed to serve weather forecasting and regional process studies. Typical simulations encompass time periods in the order of days or weeks. Thereafter regional models were also used more and more as regional climate models for longer integrations and climate change downscaling. Regional climate modeling or regional dynamic downscaling, which are used interchangeably, developed as its own branch in climate research since the end of the 1990s out of the need to bridge the obvious inconsistencies at the interface of global climate research and climate impact research. The primary aim of regional downscaling is to provide consistent regional climate change scenarios with relevant spatial resolution to serve detailed climate impact assessments.

Similar to global climate modeling, the early attempts at regional climate modeling were based on uncoupled atmospheric models or stand-alone ocean models, an approach that is still maintained as the most common on the regional scale. However, this approach has some fundamental limitations, since regional air-sea interaction remains unresolved and regional feedbacks are neglected. This is crucial when assessing climate change impacts in the coastal zone or the regional marine environment. To overcome these limitations, regional climate modeling is currently in a transition from uncoupled regional models into coupled atmosphere-ocean models, leading to fully integrated earth system models. Coupled ice-ocean-atmosphere models have been developed during the last decade and are currently robust and well established on the regional scale. Their added value has been demonstrated for regional climate modeling in marine regions, and the importance of regional air-sea interaction became obvious. Coupled atmosphere-ice-ocean models, but also coupled physical-biogeochemical modeling approaches are increasingly used for the marine realm. First attempts to couple these two approaches together with land surface models are underway. Physical coupled atmosphere-ocean modeling is also developing further and first model configurations resolving wave effects at the atmosphere-ocean interface are now available. These new developments now open up for improved regional assessment under broad consideration of local feedbacks and interactions between the regional atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere.